With unbound booklets — two 8.5 x 11” sheets each, neatly folded, printed double-sided to make an eight-page program of the five stories Merve Emre had selected as exemplars of “American miniaturism" — distributed for attendees to follow along with her, Emre, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and director of Wesleyan’s Shapiro Writing Center, led the Department of English Americanist Colloquium on Monday, Feb. 24 through “[t]oo close reading" — "reading at the smallest scale humanly possible,” showing how practices of “foregrounding the disciplined study of grammar over figuration” produce “a severely disciplined, minimally individualized variety of pleasure.”
No author names were printed in the programs. Emre's talk arrived at their stories, and she introduced them, minimally.
Merve Emre (center) and colloquium organizers Arush Pande and Lauren Bunce. Photo by Sarah Malone
The Americanist Colloquium next convenes on Wednesday, April 23 at 4:30 p.m in Chancellor Green, Room 105, welcoming Beth Blum, the Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.
All quotes are from Merve Emre's talk abstract. — Sarah Malone, Department of English